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Browsing by Subject "Fragmentation"
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Item All the Pieces Matter: Fragmentation-as-Agency in the Novels of Edwidge Danticat, Michelle Cliff, and Shani Mootoo(2013-01-30) Morguson, Alisun; Springer, Jennifer Thorington; Fox, Stephen L.; Henry Anthony, Ronda C.The fragmented bodies and lives of postcolonial Caribbean women examined in Caribbean literature beget struggle and psychological ruin. The characters portrayed in novels by postcolonial Caribbean writers Edwidge Danticat, Michelle Cliff, and Shani Mootoo are marginalized as “Other” by a Western patriarchal discourse that works to silence them because of their gender, color, class, and sexuality. Marginalization participates in the act of fragmentation of these characters because it challenges their sense of identity. Fragmentation means fractured; in terms of these fictive characters, fragmentation results from multiple traumas, each trauma causing another break in their wholeness. Postcolonial scholars have identified the causes and effects of fragmentation on the postcolonial subject, and they argue one’s need to heal because of it. Danticat, Cliff, and Mootoo prove that wholeness is not possible for the postcolonial Caribbean woman, so rather than ruminate on that truth, they examine the journey of the postcolonial Caribbean woman as a way of making meaning of the pieces of her life. This project contends that fragmentation – and the fracture it produces – does not bind these women to negative existences; in fact, the female subjects of Danticat, Cliff, and Mootoo locate power in their fragmentation. The texts studied include Danticat’s "Breath, Eyes, Memory" (1994) and "The Farming of Bones" (1999), Cliff’s "Abeng" (1984) and "No Telephone to Heaven" (1987), and Mootoo’s "Cereus Blooms at Night" (1996) and "He Drown She in the Sea" (2005).Item Intact landscape promotes gene flow and low genetic structuring in the threatened Eastern Massasauga Rattlesnake(Wiley, 2021-06) Kudla, Nathan; McCluskey, Eric M.; Lulla, Vijay; Grundel, Ralph; Moore, Jennifer A.; Geography, School of Liberal ArtsGenetic structuring of wild populations is dependent on environmental, ecological, and life-history factors. The specific role environmental context plays in genetic structuring is important to conservation practitioners working with rare species across areas with varying degrees of fragmentation. We investigated fine-scale genetic patterns of the federally threatened Eastern Massasauga Rattlesnake (Sistrurus catenatus) on a relatively undisturbed island in northern Michigan, USA. This species often persists in habitat islands throughout much of its distribution due to extensive habitat loss and distance-limited dispersal. We found that the entire island population exhibited weak genetic structuring with spatially segregated variation in effective migration and genetic diversity. The low level of genetic structuring contrasts with previous studies in the southern part of the species' range at comparable fine scales (~7 km), in which much higher levels of structuring were documented. The island population's genetic structuring more closely resembles that of populations from Ontario, Canada, that occupy similarly intact habitats. Intrapopulation variation in effective migration and genetic diversity likely corresponds to the presence of large inland lakes acting as barriers and more human activity in the southern portion of the island. The observed genetic structuring in this intact landscape suggests that the Eastern Massasauga is capable of sufficient interpatch movements to reduce overall genetic structuring and colonize new habitats. Landscape mosaics with multiple habitat patches and localized barriers (e.g., large water bodies or roads) will promote gene flow and natural colonization for this declining species.